From the news weeklies

Pope Benedict XVI has been in office for just over 100 days. Newsweek and Time, in their August 15 issues, examined how he could revitalise the Catholic church in an increasingly secular Europe.

Newsweek's Christopher Dickey said the 78-year-old's goal to "reconquer Europe for Christ" would be difficult for a pontiff who "sees himself as an old gentleman of limited energy" and who lacks the charisma of his predecessor, John Paul II.

The new pope also risks being undone by his scholastic approach. "As the church under Benedict tries to assert itself in the midst of raging political debates over specific questions such as stem-cell research, abortion, the roles of religion in education and gay marriage ... the risk is that Benedict's very serious teachings will be simplified to the point of caricature," said Dickey. In a Europe where only 15% of the population attend a place of worship weekly, Benedict's vision was going to be "a tough sell".

That sales pitch could be enhanced by two factors, said Jeff Israely in Time: conservative Catholic lay groups, such as Youth 2000 and Opus Dei, are flourishing and young people "may be ready for Benedict's message". According to research by America's Georgetown University, 50% of European Catholics born after 1981 attend mass weekly, compared with 39% just a generation ago.

But there are fears within the Vatican that lay organisations, some of which have been accused of being too secretive and of using mind control techniques, may supplant the role of parish priests, thereby undermining papal authority and Benedict's vision.

"They are useful for spreading the Gospels, but they overstep their role," said an unnamed Vatican official, who worked closely with the Pope when Benedict was head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the church's doctrinal overseer.

The "long-standing puzzle of how spaghetti breaks" has been solved by physicists, revealed the Economist (August 13). Dried spaghetti "almost never breaks in half, but instead fragments into three or more pieces". Why? According to two enterprising French researchers, it is down to "so-called flexural waves". The investigation, complete with an oddly compelling video of a man snapping a spaghetti strand can be found at www.lmm.jussieu.fr/spaghetti.